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Weird Drama at the Drug Czar's Office

Submitted by smorgan on
We've all been wondering why the National Drug Control Strategy hasn't been released yet, and it looks like Newsweek figured it out:

These have been tough times for White House drug czar R. Gil Kerlikowske. After spending much of his first year in office crafting a new anti-drug strategy, he had hoped to unveil it two months ago with President Obama. But Kerlikowske couldn't get on Obama's schedule. When he pressed, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel directed him to Vice President Joe Biden, say two Kerlikowske advisers who asked not to be identified talking about an internal matter. But after agreeing to a joint announcement, Biden had to cancel at the last minute when the health-care bill landed on the president's desk. Appearing before a House subcommittee recently, Kerlikowske got hammered for not having yet produced the drug-control strategy that his office was charged with releasing by last Feb. 1.

That's crazy. I guess when the drug czar was getting yelled at by Congress for not releasing the damn thing, he couldn’t exactly explain that he'd been sitting on it for months waiting for Obama or Biden to attend the press conference. What an embarrassing mess. The whole story, along with a copy of the strategy itself, was leaked to Newsweek by someone with access. Mark Kleiman speculates about who that may have been, and Pete Guither has some thoughts on it as well.

Personally, I don't know what to think, except that it sounds like the White House doesn't give a crap about the drug czar's office, and someone decided to expose them for it. It all sounds like a blatant attempt to throw Obama/Biden under the bus for not caring about the drug problem, and it won't work because everyone who knows what the National Drug Control Strategy is also knows that it's a bunch of predictable propaganda regardless of who's standing on stage when it's released.

To make a long story short, it sounds like years of deceptive and hysterical drug war posturing from the drug czar's office have left a legacy of irrelevance and ill-repute. Richly deserved, indeed.

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